Re: Swarm GUI

[Sven Thommesen]

Manor Askenazi wrote:
> 
> >> I was just testing a probe on an agent and noticed something.  When the
> >> probe comes up, it does not show any of the methods/variables from the
> >> super-class.
> 
> > You can get the higher level items by pressing on the .... etc. etc.
> 
> Hmmm.... From previous messages about the Swarm GUI as well as discussions
> with individual swarm-users I'm starting to realise that quite a few of the
> features of the GUI are going unnoticed (the ability to drag&drop object
> arguments, for example).
> 
> In order to remedy this, I'll be posting a little tutorial which uses
> heatbugs to show all the points about the interface which are being missed.
> 
> If y'all have some free time etc., try it out... Also this would be a good
> opportunity to make suggestions about the GUI if you have any (not including
> the scrollbar issue which has been dealt with for the next release :-)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Manor.

Manor,

thanks for the nice tutorial -- never knew you could do all that ...

As for a wish list of  improvements to the gooey part of Swarm, here's a
snip from a recent message I sent to Brian George (you may have found
the whole thing in your in-box):

"... imagine a Raster display, with the following additions: along the 
left edge, on/off buttons which select which bugs to display. (These 
would operate independently, so that you could select all bugs if 
desired.) Along the right edge, buttons which choose which attribute 
(heat-) space to display; these would be mutually exclusive. Now you 
could easily change your display on-the-fly to focus on what you wanted 
to see ..."

And, to add to that, an expanded probe capability where, if you designate 
a rectangular area in the above display with your mouse (in the same way 
as you can in the averager graphs), you'd get a predefined collection of 
probes and averagers on whatever bugs exist in the designated area.

So, do you think such a gadget is within the bounds of the possible?

--Sven
PS: To make the area-probe capability work right, we'd have to finally 
fix the code in heatbugs that at present fails to ensure that you don't 
put one bug on top of another! When that happens, the World grid 'loses' 
one of the bugs until both have moved elsewhere. And the area-probe would 
need to query the World for 'who's on first', rather than asking the bug 
swarms.